Top Ten Cancelled TV Shows That Should Continue As Comic Books

With the cancellation announcement of HBO’s terrific Bored to Death yesterday, another TV show […]

September 7, 2017, 12:37am

With the cancellation announcement of HBO’s terrific Bored to Death yesterday, another TV show that many described over its run as “too smart to last” goes down the television rabbit hole. Like so many before it, it leaves a rabid fanbase behind that may be small by television standards, but would outsell the most popular monthly comics on the stands. At its lowest, for example, Bored to Death had 150,000 viewers watching an episode–which of course doesn’t include people who used HBO’s free and popular digital services to view the program later or (like this writer) bought it digitally on Amazon after the fact.Licensed properties have always had sporadic success at best from DC and Marvel, but it can be argued that they haven’t been top sellers in part because they’re not a priority for the companies, marketing-wise. Titles like The Lone Ranger, Ghostbusters and True Blood have not only performed well for smaller publishers, but helped to elevate their company’s profile in the mainstream bookstore market, which may not be watched by comic book fans as closely as direct market sales but which has more potential upside in many ways.Series like Futurama and Buffy the Vampire Slayer have been big success stories in comic books, coming close to as many comic book issues as they had TV episodes. But for every one of those, there are botched and aborted adaptations that make readers wonder why they were ever made in the first place…or digital-exclusive comics marketed only to fans of the show, without regard for the comics market (we’re looking at you, Burn Notice). There’s also the questions of whether a canceled show would really even work as a comic (the fast-moving, scene-changing nature of shows like the returning Arrested Development and on-the-bubble Community make imagining how they would keep their tone in another medium a hard thing to do), or whether its fan base would buy into comics as a way to tell the story (I can’t see fans of Men of a Certain Age or Memphis Beat taking in large numbers to their local comic shops).All of that considered, what are the ten shows we’d most like to see revived as comic books? In alphabetical order, since it’s hard to prioritize such a thing…!